“If you had turned the television off after 35 minutes, you’d never believe it,” Luis Enrique said. What he did not say was why anyone would turn off a match that was as much fun as this: “The best football in Europe at the moment,” El Mundo Deportivo called it, while Sport described it as “very Premier”: dizzying, fast, confused. A game that ended with Manchester City beating Barcelona for the first time; with Pep Guardiola beating them for the first time too. “At last,” opened the match report in Marca. The second half had been a “citizens’ recital”, it read.
What had changed, everyone wondered? “Don’t ask me what Pep said,” Nolito replied, “my English still isn’t up to much.” Something certainly had. “Barcelona surrendered to their chaotic end, so different to their stupendous start – a contrast that makes their performance at the Etihad Stadium indecipherable,” Ramón Besa wrote in El País. City shifted too, catching them. This was a different Guardiola team, a little countercultural: swifter, more direct, Guardiola explaining the value of “verticality”, beyond the pressure of Ivan Rakitic and Sergio Busquets.
“Pep hits back,” AS said. “Pep returns the going-over,” Marca agreed. David Sánchez claimed that the former Barcelona manager had “shown why everyone – except Madrid fans – thinks he is the best coach in the world”. Not that everyone followed the same line. Never one to pass up the opportunity to have a go at Guardiola, the editor of El Mundo Deportivo, Santi Nolla, suggested that this was all about Sergio Agüero, the man who should never have been on the bench in Barcelona.
“With him, they played better, had more incision, carried more danger and attacked with more sense,” Nolla wrote. “With Agüero they’re a very serious proposition.” Naturally enough, others agreed, even if their pens were not so poisonous. Marca asked and answered a question: “Is it possible to explain Kun not playing at the Camp Nou? With great difficulty.”
El Mundo Deportivo had a dig too at Ferran Soriano, who had suggested that City’s aim was not to win the Champions League this season as theirs is a long-term project. “We don’t trust him,” Xavier Bosch said. “A wolf in sheep’s clothing”, Soriano’s “nose is growing: City will fight, and they are fighting, for the Champions League”. The paper’s cartoon showed two fans walking from the ground. “If it’s any consolation, they could get Real Madrid next,” one says.
When it came to Barcelona, there was less consolation. “Barcelona’s blues,” the headline said on the front of Sport. Inside they called it a “Pepsadilla”: Pep + nightmare = not a particularly inspired headline, but you get the point.
Another writing in AS, Juan Cruz even went so far as to suggest that Guardiola appeared perturbed to be attending the “funeral” of the team he helped to build.
“This is not a one-off bad night,” Moi Llorens wrote in AS. There is concern in Catalonia, some of it crystallising around Busquets, a barometer for this team, cause and consequence of how they play. His form has fallen; so too, it appears, has the structure around him; this midfield doesn’t look quite the same now. Was the second half another sign of a team losing its religion? A superb side, sure, as talented as any other – more so – but without the control it once exercised.
Only in the first half, it did. Not that it helped much; if the average football fan is pessimistic, some Barcelona supporters take that a step or five further. “There are few things more understandable than losing at the home of the Premier League leaders, but nothing more incomprehensible than doing so having led 1-0, dominating the game and having chances to go in at half-time two or three goals up,” Sport’s editorial said. “This is a defeat without sporting consequences: unless there’s an unimaginable catastrophe, they will qualify for the next round and the most probable scenario is that they will do so top of the group. But it concerns; it would be a mistake not to take lessons from this.”
Their match report opened the way the night closed: with Oasis. “Liam Gallagher once said that Oasis were like a Ferrari: great to look at. Great to drive. And it’ll fucking spin out of control every now and again. That’s Barcelona right now.”
